Sunday, November 2, 2014

Born for Heaven

“Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ
Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through
baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the
glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life.” (Romans
6:3-4)

I remember the first time my mother showed me my baptismal
certificate when I was a teenager.I
looked at the date, November 2, 1975, and said to her, “Ugh, Mom! You baptized
me on the Day of the Dead.”This was
before I became a priest and before I started to make the connection between
baptism and death that St. Paul makes in today’s first reading.By being baptized we are reborn and become
participants in the life of Jesus.The
Catechism of the Catholic Church says “the
Church does not know of any means other than Baptism that assures entry into
eternal beatitude (Catechism 1257).”This brings us great comfort this day when we commemorate the faithful
departed on All Souls Day.We commend
them this day to the loving arms of our God confident that those who have died
with Christ will rise with him as well as St. Paul tells us: “For if we
have grown into union with him through a death like his, we shall also be
united with him in the resurrection (v. 6).”

I bring up the connection between baptism and death not
only because I was baptized on this day, but because of something that I
experienced last week.We got a call in the
office that a young woman about a mile from our church was dying of cancer and
desired to be baptized before she died.At this point, there isn’t time to scrutinize and ask questions or
catechize.Someone in intense agony had
requested the sacrament that “assures entry into eternal beatitude” so I rushed
to her bed.I took a small amount of
water and baptized this blessed soul with the same gentle touch that I use to
baptize infants.Because of the urgency
of the moment, it wasn’t until later on that I reflected that this dying woman
was indeed blessed for having been baptized before being called home by the
Father.I felt blessed that I could give
her this immortal gift from above.

We tend to forget that we were born not for this world but
for our heavenly home.As St. Augustine
reminds us, God has made us for Himself which is why our hearts will be
restless until they rest in Him.Many
people ask me how a priest can hold it together when confronted by all these
moments of death.I consider it a
blessing.Of course, I don’t want to see
someone suffer, nor see their family suffer with them, but there is something
about that moment when the Lord calls a soul home that is so profoundly sacred,
and as a friend who recently lost his father told me, “so peaceful and
beautiful.”I am keenly aware that the
dying person is moments away from being eternally embraced by their God.All Souls Day reminds us not only of our own
mortality, but that as Christians who are united to each other by the same
baptism, we are bound to pray for our faith departed, especially the blessed
souls of purgatory so that they may gain admittance to the heavenly kingdom.